wheresrhys

Or are we?

I read this article today, arguing that the constant headlines of “largest ever deficit” in the UK are alarmist and that it’s pretty abysmal that both main political parties aim to cut public spending in order to cut the national debt, when there are strong arguments to not do so. There’s a recession on, you know!

Which got me thinking about whether the national debt really is all that big. Of course it’s a big round figure (I’d type it out but am scared my ‘0′ key will break through overuse) but equally our earnings, and therefore the government’s tax revenues, are much greater than most periods in history too. What really matters is the ratio of debt to how much money is in the country, surely. So I found this graph:

UK national debt vs GPD graph

Another graph on the same page demonstrates that current national debt is at around 60% of GDP, which I don’t think is too bad given that the ongoing global economic crisis is considered to be at around the same order of magnitude as the 1930s great depression, and back then national debt hovered between 150 – 200%. I know we live in a very different, more competitive world, but I doubt it’s anywhere near as catastrophic as the papers and the politicians would have us believe.

And another thing, I grew up in a northern town with mines, steelworks and baths that don’t take half an hour to pronounce, so naturally I hated Thatcher. But then the rhetoric of the past 10 years – that she may have been harsh, but by God she prepared us for the harsh, competitive world to come – has, if not softened, at least confused that view a little. But I recently came to the realisation that she was one of the chief instigators of this new harsh world. Claiming she’s alright because she prepared us for it is like saying the guy who pushed you in front of the train is alright really because he gave you a mattress to hide behind.

Well, this has to be the quickest I’ve ever gone from idea to publishable (albeit limited functionality) website.

Deletious is my new site for simultaneously viewing a page bookmarked in Delicious and deciding whether to keep or delete the bookmark. I’ve had quite a lot of fun using it the last few days, rediscovering all sorts of articles, games, tools and other long forgotten sites. As well as wasting a lot of time reacquainting myself with all these I’ve also managed to de-clutter my Delicious account; all the CSS articles from 2-3 years ago giving an introduction to topics I now know inside out are gone from my bookmarks, as are all those gimmicky websites I can’t believe i found funny at one time.

Disappointingly, I’m having problems uploading the logo to the website’s folder, but it’ll be sorted sometime soon I hope.

So please do give it a go and let me know what you think.

Just been for a walk in the slightly snow-drenched North Downs woods (which, confusingly, are south of London). Lots of wildlife not around:

Badger

Woodcock

Grey Squirrel (which I thought was a weasel till I got home and checked on internet)

Roe Deer

Rabbit

Pheasant

Fox

One upshot of the Delicious garbage collection utility I’ve just built is it highlights gems I’d bookmarked years ago but forgotten. Some are useful, but most are rip-roaringly funny or entertaining. Here are two of the best… so far

1. Copter – a simple, single mouse button game which kept me entertained through a very dull summer at work once. I’m yet to regain my previous form, but it’s so addictive I believe I will. (*edit: top score now at 1026)
2. A cartoon to illustrate what happens when too many summers build up, one of the milder frames of which is below:

For a long time I’ve wanted to work with the Delicious API. Initially it was because the Delicious website not only had the difficult to remember del.icio.us url, but was also very badly designed. If you compared its progress – addition of new features, cleaning up of design, making use of new techniques suchas AJAX – with its web2.0 compatriots (Flickr, Digg, boris-johnson.com) it lagged way behind.

So I initially planned to build a new front-end for it, making it easier to work with your bookmarks, but before I could progress far enough in my coding abilities they completely redesigned the site; a vast improvement.

Though still not perfect. For a while I’ve found it frustrating that there is no easy way to simultaneously see the content of a bookmarked page and delete the bookmark if you deem it no longer useful, so my delicious account gradually got more and more cluttered. Well, this afternoon I decided to do something about it (and not just because I’m avoiding doing more important stuff).

But I was foiled for a long time by the laziness of the Delicious developers. My initial plan was to use javascript to get a JSON of all my bookmarks (or alternatively request one at a time) and go through them one by one, displaying the webpage in an iframe, and offering the option to discard or keep the bookmark. However, delicious only publish this data as XML which means, due to cross-domain restrictions on AJAX, you can’t just use javascript. I may be a bit hasty in pinning this on developer laziness, but I imagine creating alternate templates (because that’s all the difference between JSON and XML really) wouldn’t be too time consuming, and would greatly enhance the versatility of the API.

Anyway, I realised I would have to use a bit of PHP to get the XML and create pages from which my javascript would be able to access the data. Luckily, before I dived straight in I came across phpdelicious (which, appropriately, I have now bookmarked in Delicious) , a very easy to use php class for wrapping the Delicious API, which is very handy indeed. Less than an hour later I had built exactly what I wanted.

I reckon a few more hours development and I can make it a publicly available service.  All I need to do is include a form for other users to be able to login, and (ideally) preload websites in the iframe to speed things up (though this is problematic as some sites force the whole web page to be redirect if you try and put them in an iframe).

A friend of mine (whom I’ll be doing a website for shortly) mentioned last night that  she was impressed that I was able to learn all I know about web development from the internet (more or less)… and, come to think of it, so am I. There can’t be many careers where the internet enables you to become fully trained and, arguably, more informed than people who learn their craft just from courses and books.

But it got me thinking about how gradual a process it’s been, picking up all these skills. Starting with html, then on to CSS, then a little functional php and javascript, a slight detour into google maps, then on to fully OOP programming using jQuery and Zend framework. And I came to realise that for many of these, especially the early ones, the reason I’d started to look into them was because I worked with an idiot that didn’t understand what they were doing.

Indeed, there’s nothing like incompetence in somebody who should know what they’re doing to spur you on to learn how to do it yourself. If you’re dealing with an expert there’s very little chance your embryonic efforts will outshine theirs, and you’ll probably have little reason to want to bypass them anyway. But if you’re stuck with an idiot that constantly frustrates you with their incompetence and inability to do the simplest things, then it’s easy to convince yourself that you could do better, so you start to learn the basics, pretty confident in the knowledge that if you master these you’ll already be light years ahead of your resident idiot. Maybe all companies should have an official idiot hiring quota as part of their professional development strategy.

So here’s to you, idiots, for leading me, and probably many others, to a decent career.

I wrote this:

http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2010/02/01/giant-james-may-terrorises-kent-after-being-given-wrong-kind-of-growth-hormones/

One of the perks of working from home is that if for whatever reason (and, let’s face it, if you’re in a procrastinative mood, any reason is good enough) you feel like a break you can take one. I don’t mean playing facebook scrabble, or checking the definition of a drupe on wikipedia, all the while trying to look busy and keeping a watchful eye out for your manager; I mean a proper break, maybe away from your desk or doing something not usually allowed in an office.

I’ve recently turned to the latter. Long-term readers (all 8 of you) will know that I have been accompanying an Irish fiddler on the guitar for about a year. Just before Christmas I got the urge to have a go at an instrument more traditionally associated with carrying the melody, so I got a tin whistle.

I can’t stress enough how important it is for every parent to campaign for their schools to teach the tin whistle instead of the recorder.

1. It has a much nicer sound, particularly when placed in unskilled sounds
2. It’s got a much more fun, unstuffy repertoire
3. Last, but definitely not least, a tin whistle has no wrong notes on it! It has all the notes of the D or C scale on it (typically) and though you still have to hit the right ones to play a tune it’s much harder to sound as disastrously wrong as you can on a chromatic instrument.

But back to the point. My current preferred displacement activity from work is playing the tin whistle, and I reccommend any home-workers who read this to try it out. Just get yourself a whistle for a tenner or so, read brother steve’s website to understand tin whistle technique, listen to some tunes on youtube (Planxty are a good place to start as a lot of the pipe songs are in the same key as a standard whistle and not too fast to hear the notes), and try and copy them (or if you read music find the score on the session).

As a warning though, it does become addictive. For instance, during the writing of this post I’ve played two reels and a hornpipe.

And I’m about to have a crack at a jig.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but for the past half year or so I’ve been living as the lodger in the basement of a big family home. The patriarch is a psychologist, and on the ground floor his surgery is located. Sometimes patients come down to the basement to use my toilet.

Today I noticed (possibly influenced by the marvellous film Kenny) that in the space of a few minutes (while I was making coffee) a patient managed to use an entire roll of toilet paper. I don’t mean that a toilet roll was gone, but that one had been completely unravelled, leaving only the cardboard tube behind.

Which leaves me unsure as to whether he should be seeing a psychologist or booking himself in for an endoscopy.

This blog is meant to do two things:

1. Let the world know that I’m a decent front-end web developer
2. Be the focus for a new doomsday cult

Number two is progressing nicely as no-one has gotten wise to my subliminal messages yet, but what of number one?

Let’s evaluate:

• Design – it’s not finished yet (and never will be as I will hopefully do a redesign next month when I have a bit more time), which doesn’t look so good
• Javascript, CSS, HTML – apart from mentioning the odd bug/annoyance there’s very little to show what I can do with these… aside from my jQuery plugins which hardly have pride of place either

Over the last few months I’ve come across a few blogs which, unlike mine, really cut the mustard when it comes to being an extended portfolio, putting mine to shame.

jasonsantamaria.com and dustincurtis.com are a little bit twitter generation for my liking, but one can’t deny that their blogs, where every article has a different design, are great examples of showing off on your blog.

But my favourite, which I came across today, has got to be www.romancortes.com. Most of his most recent posts feature him achieving visual effects which simply have to involve Flash… only they don’t, and in many cases achieve quite striking results without even using javascript; just pure CSS/HTML. As he himself admits, most of the demos aren’t much use in a practical website, but they’re still pretty impressive in showing what surprising visual effects can be achieved, and figuring out how he did them is quite a good test of your understanding of CSS. My favourites are the coke can and the old master.

Obviously, when you see that someone has managed to animate a rolling coke can using just one static image of a coke can label and some CSS, and after the initial wow has subsided, a Peep Show quote springs to mind:

Super Hans: I think this is probably the best example of the sort of stuff we’d do we’ve ever had.
Jez: Oh yeah. ’cause sometimes it’s really hard actually to do your own ideas

Do I have it in me to produce a more stunning showcase of what I can do? Who knows, but having just learned The Mason’s Apron on guitar I feel invincible!!!